EP #261 - Samuel Mueller: Scandit Revisited

This episode was produced in cooperation with the ETH Entrepreneur Club.

Timestamps:

3:20 - IoT 10 years ago

20:02 - Subscription based models and high margins

25:09 - Going international from day one

30:02 - Picking Ariel Lüdi as an investor

45:00 - Scaling your team

About Samuel Mueller:

Samuel Mueller is the co-founder and CEO at Scandit, the leading technology platform for mobile computer vision and augmented reality (AR) solutions for enterprises. He holds a PhD in Computer Science and Temporal Logics from ETH Zurich. Together with Christian Floerkermeier and Christof Roduner, he created Scandit in 2009.

Their goal with Scandit was to create a bridge between real world objects and the digital information available about them. Barcodes were then the natural entry points, especially at a time when phone cameras were just starting to become ubiquitous.

Nowadays they work with 4 key verticals:

• Large retail organizations
• Logistics organizations
• Big manufacturers
• Health organizations

Scandit runs a subscription-based model which allows customers to “go as they grow”, meaning the bigger they get, the more Scandit services they can accrue. It's also a very high margin business, because a lot of the heavy lifting, the computer vision magic, is happening on the user devices, so there’s no distinct cloud need.

Memorable Quotes:

"As an entrepreneur, if you don’t get really good at saying ‘no’, you’re gonna get terribly distracted."

"Today’s customers are really smart. If you don’t have an answer ready for them, they’re already on their way to check out the product somewhere else."

If you would like to listen to our previous episode on Scandit, check out our conversation with Christof Roduner.

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